Cavediver writes:
Now Dick is another matter
Did you know him personally?
Richard Feynman is a hero to most who have ever chosen to study physics in recent times.
Wiki on RF and String Theory writes:
Feynman diagrams are now fundamental for string theory and M-theory, and have even been extended topologically. Feynman's mental picture for these diagrams started with the hard sphere approximation, and the interactions could be thought of as collisions at first. It was not until decades later that physicists thought of analyzing the nodes of the Feynman diagrams more closely. The world-lines of the diagrams have developed to become tubes to allow better modeling of more complicated objects such as strings and membranes.
From his diagrams of a small number of particles interacting in spacetime, Feynman could then model all of physics in terms of those particles' spins and the range of coupling of the fundamental forces. Feynman attempted an explanation of the strong interactions governing nucleons scattering called the parton model. The parton model emerged as a complement to the quark model developed by his Caltech colleague Murray Gell-Mann. The relationship between the two models was murky; Gell-Mann referred to Feynman's partons derisively as "put-ons". Feynman did not dispute the quark model; for example, when the fifth quark was discovered, Feynman immediately pointed out to his students that the discovery implied the existence of a sixth quark, which was duly discovered in the decade after his death.
But as a key proponent of physics as a predictive and ultimately testable discipline Feynman himself said:
RF regarding string theory writes:
"I don't like that they're not calculating anything," he said. "I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanationa fix-up to say, 'Well, it still might be true.'" These words have since been much-quoted by opponents of the string-theoretic direction for particle physics.
I was "raised" on Feynman as an undergraduate. But I was also raised on string theory as the most likely "theory of everything" (in the sense that those teaching me were working on it even if what they were teaching me was well below that level).
So the attitude of current string theorists to RPF and his very "practical predictions are all that count" mentality are very interesting to me.
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